Do you want to restore your mind? Let your body talk.

In her virtual sessions with clients, Kehinde found a “delicate balance, because the body can be the scariest place to be present”, and she worried she would miss signals on Zoom that “someone was way over the threshold”. She taught clients to scan their bodies for areas of sanctuary upon waking. She learned supportive SE self poses, like the one Price described, with hands on forehead and back of neck, or hands in layers on chest. She advised lying under a weighted blanket. She did much the same for herself, with the scans and the holds, and by having her roommate lie on top of her like a dead weight. Floyd’s murder, Kehinde says, left many black people deprived of agency and gravely threatened, “disordered” and “hypervigilant.” With her somatic work, she says, she could bring in some degree of internal control.

The span of issues covered by SE are wide-ranging, from utter devastation to plain obsession. Alyssa Petersel is a social worker and the founding owner of a website that matches clients with the long list of therapists, so she is well acquainted with a range of practices. For herself, she chose a practitioner with SE in her repertoire because, she says, her “anxiety, perfectionism, and workaholism” can lead to “activated states of panic” and “cognitive loops” that cannot be reliably pacified by to ask “the mind to refocus.”

Last year, as her wedding approached, she was overwhelmed by the question of whether or not she would take her husband’s surname. Night after night, unable to sleep, she made pros and cons lists. “I rolled down rabbit holes of ‘What does it mean?’ If I keep my name, I’m a feminist; if I don’t, I will abandon all women who -. She continued, “My maiden name was rational, boss bitch, concrete. The other side was more woo-woo: you promise to be each other’s person and you can’t change your name? What’s wrong with you?” With her therapist, she learned to focus on “super helpful data” from her body, as Petersel put it, to “trust the visceral. It was enlightening.”

On the spectrum of suffering, Lauren (she only asked me to use her first name to protect her privacy) is far from Petersel. Lauren stepped into Emily Price’s office in 2016, three years after she was raped and strangled unconscious and near death on a path leading to her door in her home city, Indianapolis. She woke up in the hospital with no memory of the attack. The whites of her eyes were bright red from all the burst blood vessels. A conversation with a sex crimes detective revealed the magnitude of what had happened, but she still couldn’t access the memory. No one was ever caught. Lauren had some counseling and tried to return to her former life. And outwardly she was successful. Three months after the attack, she was promoted at her company. Less than a year later, she moved to New York City, where she had long wanted to live. She traveled a lot for her work.

In New York, Lauren went to work with a therapist. During their first session, Lauren brought up a number of issues she wanted to address, mentioning the rape and strangulation only in the last few minutes and not seeing anything out of the ordinary. “I was completely numb,” she told me. “It was shocking, for such a self-conscious person as I think I am, how disconnected I was, how dissociated.”